Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Tom Dooley

“Why?”

“Well, he was all right for the first two years, but then the 26th fought at Gettysburg, and James was wounded-left shoulder and right leg. He still limps a little. You might’a seen that.”

I nodded. “He got shot at Gettysburg?”

“Yes. It’s no wonder. Pink says James volunteered to carry the regimental colors into battle. So everybody else is shooting bullets, and he’s carrying a damn flag. Of course he got shot. Never a thought for me. What was I supposed to do if he got himself killed?”

“Marry Tom, I reckon. Maybe he thought he would be doing you a favor if he got killed in the War.”

“But what if Tom had got killed, too? Then where would I be? I used to ask myself sometimes, if only one of them was to come back, which one would I want it to be?”

Anybody with any sense would have picked James Melton in an instant, but that bundle of twigs and feathers and scraps of bright cloth that passed for Ann Melton’s mind probably thought otherwise. “And you were hoping for Tom?”

She nodded. “Tom and me-we’ve been together all our lives. We loved each other as children.”

I laughed. “I would have thought you’d had enough of him.”

“Well, that was before I married up with James. I’m not sorry about it, though. I knew I couldn’t be marrying up with Tom. It would have been a waste not to lay with the one person in the world I truly did love. I’m glad we did. I hadn’t any business to marry James, I reckon, but he had land and a trade, and I needed so bad to get away from home. I couldn’t stand it another day-mama with her likker and her endless stream of men, and another baby every year. So I let James take me away, because he so much wanted to. I reckon he’s sorry now.”

That was exactly what I was thinking, but I took care not to show it. “He seems like a good man, though. You didn’t love him a bit?”

“Of course I do. He’s kind and he works hard, and he was wonderful brave in the War. I wish I could be like him, Pauline, but I’m not. I could never be that steady and good. I’m just like Tom. Good-looking and lazy, but passionate, too, to those we truly love-to each other-and able to laugh and have fun, instead of thinking all the time about working and saving up some money. We’re just the same, Tom and me. We come from the same place, and we’re made of the same clay. And maybe the devil spit in it before God made us, but at least we belong together, him and me.”

“It seems hard lines on your husband, you feeling like that.”

“I love them both, Pauline, but not in the same way. My love for James is like that field out there that he spends half his time plowing and sowing and weeding, and all. It will change. The crops die in the winter, or dry up in a summer drought, or the soil gives out, so that you must let it lie fallow for a time and let the weeds take it. It comes and goes, that field. But Tom… Tom is like that green mountain you can see rising there in the west, holding up the sky. It never changes. It will be just the same forever.”

“Well, you’re not the same, are you? You up and married somebody else the first chance you got.”

“That didn’t change anything! If I had married Tom, where would it have got us? Starving in a ditch somewhere? I thought maybe if I married a man with land and prospects, then I could do something for Tom. Maybe we could help him get a place of him own, or maybe James could hire him on to help build the wagons.”

“Even I know Tom Dula better than that. ”

“Well, it’s true. He isn’t interested in taking up a trade. I misjudged how much I could push him into doing something. But I’ll not forsake him, whatever he comes to be. If this whole state had been laid waste by fire and cannons, and Tom had lived on, then I’d be content to keep going. But if not a single foot of Carolina soil had been touched in the War, but Tom had died in battle, then this world would be a desert to me, and I’d quit it as quick as I could.”

I shook my head, for none of it made a bit of sense to me. “Well, you were luckier than most women. Luckier than you deserved to be. Both your men went to war, and both of them came back.”

“A thousand times I wished the War had made my choice for me. In a way, though, Tom’s going off to fight helped me live through it. I didn’t mind when we had to drink chicory instead of coffee, and do without meat ’cause bushwhackers stole all our chickens, because I knew that, wherever he was, Tom was going hungry, too, and it made me feel closer to him.”

From the sound of it, James Melton had suffered a deal more than Tom had, but he wasn’t the sort of man who lets on about his troubles or his sorrows, so I guess Ann never knew or cared what he went through. I wondered about it, but there was no use trying to explain any of that to Ann. Instead I told her, “There was a woman up home in the Globe that dressed up like a boy and followed her man off to war. You ever think of that?”

“I heard about her. She and her man were in the same regiment as James and my brother. But I don’t reckon I could pass for a boy, do you?” Ann smiled and touched her breasts. “Anyhow, if I had gone, Tom would have ended up having to look out for me, and so I’d have been a danger to him. It was better for me to wait here. I never had no word from him, of course. Even if he could write, I couldn’t read a letter. But all the same, if he had died, I would have known. The instant it happened, I would have known.”

“So now he is back. What happens now?”

“I don’t know,” said Ann. “Whatever he wants to happen, I reckon.”

There was one person in Wilkes County who could keep a secret, apparently. Dr. George Carter wasn’t bruiting it about that his patient Pauline Foster had the pox. Sy-phi-lis, he called it, when he spoke to me about it, but he didn’t talk about it to nobody else. Or if he did, it didn’t reach the ears of the ordinary folk in the settlement, for Dr. Carter did not associate with the likes of them. He went to elegant parties with the quality folk, up at Colonel Isbell’s fine house, drinking wine out of crystal goblets, and dancing on polished oak floors under a crystal chandelier. I had never seen the inside of such a place, but some of the women had been inside the Isbells’ house on some errand or other, and they never tired of singing its praises.

Maybe I didn’t matter enough for him to talk about.

Whatever the reason, the real story of Pauline Foster’s shameful ailment did not get threshed out in the gossip mills of Happy Valley. They figured me for consumption, I think, as pale and scrawny as I was, and I never told them any different.

There are some that would say that I should have told Ann what my illness really was. When she bade me to lay with her lover Tom Dula, I might have spoke up then, and told her that I had the pox, and that if she threw us together, she was condemning Tom and a raft of other people-including herself-to share my affliction. I’ll bet she would have thought twice about her plan then. But I never gave her the chance to reconsider-and why should I? If you ask me, Ann Melton was already blessed enough in this world. She had the sort of beauty that made men tongue-tied to look at her-worse than that, they thought she had the look of a fine lady. “ An aristocratic beauty.” Her that would lay with a drover for a sack of coffee beans. And she had a house and a husband, and two men that loved her.

What did I ever have? What did this world ever give me, except pain, and hunger, hard work, and finally a deadly affliction, that would carry me off, like as not, afore I ever saw thirty. And sick as I was, I washed Ann Melton’s drawers after she had been with her lover; and I cooked her food, and scrubbed her floor, and emptied the slop jars every morning. What charity did I owe her? It seemed to me that she had been given too much already. And perhaps it was up to me to even the score a little, for all the plain, unloved women who must trudge through life in bone-weary misery. Pretty, selfish, stupid Ann had it coming, for she never gave a thought to anyone’s needs but her own. And if Tom Dula was brought low in my trap to ensnare Ann, that was too bad. Back during the War I had seen enough of soldiers to know that they showed little enough mercy to others, and I was satisfied to pay one back in kind when I could.